Posted on 01/08/2020 4:05:30 PM PST by blam
I predict that 20% of colleges and universities will shut down or merge in the next 10 years, and probably more.
It was a good run.
Most people fail to understand that higher education is in itself countercyclical. When the economy is bad, and people lose jobs, many of them will go back to school. You have probably heard about the for-profit education boom and bust. That is old news. You might not have heard that total enrollment has been declining for the last eight years as the economy has improved. What comes next will pulverize nearly every institution of higher learning in the country, private and public.
The reason: demographics. Basically, an echo of the baby bust of the early seventies. I was born at the bottom of that baby bust in 1974. My small generation hatched a small generation, which is now making its way through college. Enrollment will drop 15% on average, on top of the eight-year correction that schools have already experienced. This may not seem like much, but finances at colleges and universities have deteriorated sharply, and many of them will not even be able to withstand a drop of a few percent.pA Bull Market in Higher Education
There have been bull markets in dot-com stocks, homebuilder stocks, energy stocks, and FANG stocks. There can be a bull market in anything, even higher education.
Unless you have been trapped under something heavy, you probably know that college is expensive.
It is expensive because it is implicitly subsidized by the federal government, which will lend any amount of money to any student without regard for willingness or ability to repay.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at mauldineconomics.com ...
Yes, Alabama is wildly profitable. Only a handful of football programs are, and hundreds of schools have tried to replicate what Alabama is doing."
- Roll Tide -
Not to worry.
The higher ed racket will just import tens of millions more customers.
STEM programs still important, Some utility for classic liberal arts programs. 2 year programs for craft development. NO loans for other majors.
Yes a rigorous liberal arts education that include mathematics and physics.
Bttt
Most do include them now, but remedial math and physics for dummies satisfy the current requirements.
A good liberal arts degree is very valuable. A lousy one will wreck many minds for life. This is sort of like football but without a short-term balance sheet that ought to snap one back into reality.
Most liberal arts programs should probably be blown up.
I say that as someone who teaches in a liberal arts program.
Also worth noting: I survived doing a liberal arts degree at the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell U, the poster child of the Closing of the American Mind by Bloom.
There were still some good minds there teaching solid stuff, but you needed luck, grace, or more knowledge than most 18 year olds have to get through, and that was a long time ago, or so I am told (Reagan was in the White House).
- Roll Tide -
Just caught your tag line. The gods of the copy books?
Thanks for posting...I read their stuff a lot, and the guy before who wrote TTMYGHMM...
My oldest son is 20, and is in ChemEng are University of Cincinnati...He just got through telling me how much of college is a scam and some deserve to go out of business...how prescient of a 20 yr old. Of course I was proud and beaming inside...
The for-profit schools were not a boom and bust.
They were shut down by Obama and his DOE, even the ones that were not having problems. He left a lot of students here without a place to complete their degree. Really a shame, frankly.
I could be wrong, but I think he’s understating football income. The whole reason for the push for paid athletes is because of the income they generate. Here’s an interestig cite. If credible . . . . .https://www.athleticscholarships.net/profitable-college-football-programs.htm
Even a solid year of college alebra, trig, and geometry combined with a full year of college phyics would be step in the right direction. The college physics course would be not calculus based but still somewhat rigorous.
Grant Williams of https://ttmygh.com
The best courses I ever took by far were taught in the field at actual manufacturing plants.
Which is better for physics, a classroom or an actual particle accelerator facility?
How about Chemistry? Classroom or a refinery? Or a pharmaceutical plant?
Portable, affordable teleconferencing killed the primary advantage campuses had.
Universities are today where newspapers and record companies were in 1998. And where book publishers were in 2010.
Their efforts to prolong their existence are going to play out exactly the same.
Obama DOE shut off financial aid to for-profit colleges, leading most of them to file for bankruptcy or shut down.
With all the students now without an ability to get a vocational degree, federal student loan defaults then skyrocketed.
The Tide is OUT
Of the CFP
Did the Post Office dry up and wither due to total inefficiency and inability to compete? No. Although now a “service” it is fully tax exempt and you can’t compete with mailboxes and delivery by a company for first class letters for example.
Will be true of indoctrination centers (”colleges and universities”) which are needed to keep replaceable robot parts of socialists’ society working. Cost effectiveness and efficiency not relevant to higher funding by taxes. (Heard of CA and City of Detroit?)Private ones will become tax supported to keep the education scam going.
This assumes the new America will be socialist. If we win in 2020 and beyond then we can upend that.
Nobody needs college to be a youtube star
Nobody needs college to be a social media influencer
“Which is better for physics, a classroom or an actual particle accelerator facility?”
Waste to put a student at an advanced facility without knowing the basics.
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